EN

The Same River Twice

"The new body of work by Portuguese photographer, Virgílio Ferreira, entitled Being and Becoming. Couched in a symbolic, literary mode of photography, the series is a subjective and dreamy meditation on the lives and environments of several migrant workers from Portugal, who left their country of birth to start a new life in new lands, principally due to economic reasons."

"That certain something is indeed incredibly subtle and nuanced. Arriving in these quiet yet intense
photographs, figures vie for prominence but are routinely blurred and shift in and out of focus amid expansive landscapes, while at other times their depiction gives way to shadows or simply teeters on the threshold of visibility altogether. Ferreira’s images appear fluid, unfixed and transitory, as are the subjects he portrays. They play with diffuse traces, obstructions and layers of dappled light to lock us in moments where elements of past and future coalesce with the present.."

"In a sense, the photographs seen in Being and Becoming are more like a collection of proverbs that speaks to certain universal truths. Something is happening here that heralds a unity of opposites, a flux doctrine that ultimately points to the way things are the same and not the same over time. Now is then: what came before comes after..."